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Dessert

Mexican Tortillas

A cornmeal tortilla made by mixing cornmeal with boiling and cold water, seasoning with salt, and cooking on a hot griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Mexican Tortillas

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix the cornmeal with enough boiling water to barely wet it.

  2. Add cold water to make a thin mush consistency.

  3. Stir in the salt.

Cook

  1. Drop large spoonfuls onto a hot griddle and spread them out to form thin cakes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

White cornmeal
Forms the base of the tortillas, giving them their corn flavor and structure once cooked.
Boiling water
Partly cooks the cornmeal starch so the mixture binds and becomes pliable.
Cold water
Thins the mixture to a spreadable mush consistency.

The step that matters

Adding the cold water to reach a thin mush. The mush must be thin enough to spread into a cake but not runny. Too much water makes the cakes fragile and slow to set on the griddle, while too little leaves them stiff and cracked.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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